It’s 2007. A young Mr Swan starts his career in education. His first placement is a brand new £27,000,000 build. Every classroom has a suite of laptops at the back and every block has an additional IT computer room. It’s a school set up for the future where digital and online learning has been established within the architecture of the institution. This is quite eye opening to me, coming from a rural school background that still delivered lessons via chalkboards and OHTs. Even my university only had a few computer rooms here and there. Here, there is an early iteration of the future, like early but flawed electric cars.
But there was something else in the structure too; the Virtual Learning Environment. Accessed through the school’s website, each department was expected to have a digital space of curated resources, from which a student could self-learn. This online space opened learning to students at home, or in tuition spaces, revoking the need for a teacher to be present and providing the opportunity for self-directed learning. It was in essence a ‘facilitated’ delivery style of education, not a ‘taught’ style.
In the early 2000s, the VLE was an infancy product, and the drag and drop ‘blocks’ style of web design was not available to us – the kind that I am using to build this website. It meant that the VLE pages were difficult to make attractive, designed in navigable ways, and couldn’t benefit from pre-made styles – gifs, clip art icons and text boxes were scattered with little sense of ‘design language’. Uptake by students was understandably low, and so the motivation to continue developing the VLEs was undermined. I suspect there was some resistance too from teachers that felt an academic subject required the presence and authority of the expert who ‘teaches’ a subject. But the intention of these online learning environments was prescient – technology could be used to increase accessibility to learning and this was not to the detriment of the teacher, but to the benefit of the learner. This was akin to those early electric cars by Legacy automakers; the first electric Golf , the first electric Mini. They were built by legacy automakers experimenting with new technologies, but they were not well received by the public.
Covid made the point very firmly, that facilitated learning really was necessary in the modern world. Students unable to be present at the point of delivery still needed access to good learning documentation; learning that could be easily decoded, easily absorbed, and easily passed into long term memory without the presence of the academic authority. But the VLEs didn’t always use their head start on lockdown to have evolve. Some departments did curate webpages of facilitated tuition, but many resorted to something easier; using the VLE to tunnel through to the existing folders of Powerpoints being used in the classroom. It seemed to be that with small adaptations to existing .ppts, simply increasing access met the needs of hybrid education.
Now, Powerpoint is a highly versatile software (and one that I’ve even used to create an animated introduction sequence for vlogs). Its primary function is in the presentation of keynotes, data, imagery. But in the hands of a teacher, it becomes a textbook containing extracts of reading, copying, activity, and assessment. Powerpoints can often become a highly controlled system in which the minute by minute experience of the lesson is directed by animations, transitions and clicks. The teacher is chained to the desk, the attention of the students is chained up at the board. And everyone is servant to the Powerpoint. Our servile attendance to the board is sometimes a response to behaviours in the room. By having a highly controlled environment, that is low in self-determination, disruptive behaviours can be challenged; the student must read, the student must listen, the student must do – all as the Powerpoint says. This places a lot of authority in the device but is an easy way to standardise practise across a department, and to check-box conformity. Powerpoints have their place in the classroom, but outside of the classroom, they become problematic..
The software is responsible for multiple domains; the pedagogical domain of pacing and structure; the cognitive domain of knowledge and concepts; and the behavioural domain. In many circumstances, this balance becomes a conflict between who the device is ultimately supposed to serve the needs of. A student at home is not necessarily going to be benefited by a learning device that is attempting to provide the needs of the presenter, nor the pacing of the lesson, nor the lack of self-determination. The many domains they juggle are not relevant to learners at home, and attempting to hybridise a classroom resources for home-learning only adds new domains encoded into the presentation. It is the very act of increasing the intrinsic load of the device, which is harmful to learners and their progress.
A parallel can be seen in the car industry today. Legacy manufacturers of petrol and diesel cars – Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles – have had to juggle the cost implications of moving their legacy architecture to the new era of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV). The evolution of ICE architecture has been an incredibly costly one that has come to balance weight and performance, finding small gains here or discovering limitations there. Engine bays accommodate the largest engine size, fuel tanks take up space, fire barriers separate the occupants from the combustion. Getting these physical structures right is costly, hence, we see manufacturers sharing vehicle architecture and engine systems to reduce the upfront cost. Those are costs that are embedded into the long term finances of the manufacturer that need recouping through mass production and generations of ‘face changes’ to each model.
Like in the auto industry, schools – the legacy auto maker – were the first to really try this. Their first experiments really were to hybridise the new technology into existing working practise, and like those first electric cars, they were not well received.
But the world has changed significantly, and the customer is now far more environment-focused. BEVs themselves have the same high upfront architecture costs, if they are to be designed to balance the pros and cons of the battery systems. New manufacturers like Tesla get to make a fresh start with their long term finances and commit to one new architecture from the offset. This brand new design would be a doubling of costs for legacy manufacturers who are still optimised around delivering ICE systems. And private education companies can build wholey new teaching structures around the new technology without the financial burden of existing structures. Legacy manufacturers have often been slow to take on battery electric vehicles, and the cost implications make sense – new startups can simply accrue the cost of new architecture once, legacy manufacturers can’t. Companies like Tesla make huge strides by being willing to commit to the technology and design from the ground up, in a way that schools didn’t when faced with the new technology.
To mitigate the cost of change, schools took the old architecture of Powerpoints and tried to adapt them to a new ‘hybrid learning’ system by adding more activities, encoding more tuition, and making them ‘graphic’. These adapted Powerpoints have been placed into student accessible areas using VLEs, and the box for ‘continuity’ has been ticked. Now no student ever be left behind, no matter where they are learning from, and no new upfront cost was incurred. But like the hybrid vehicle architecture, it feels somehow like we are mis-selling the product. Somehow these Powerpoints which attempt to hybridize both the home learner and the classroom teacher have created a resources that is no longer appropriate for either. Hybridized Powerpoints are a hybridized car, suffering the limitations of both architectures with few benefits and we know from the auto-industry that the best architecture is one built from the ground up, not one that attempts to hybridise both systems.
Here’s the rub. Eventually, all legacy car manufacturers will have to build a competitive electric architecture and it will have to be designed from scratch. Schools will have to ditch Powerpoint delivered lessons and opt for an online facilitative model that can be picked up and continued anywhere, by anyone. The longer schools take to affect the change, the further ahead their competitors will stride, and even today, legacy auto makers are behind Tesla in range, cost and packaging.
This is effectively where Discipline Of English steps in. It provides a curriculum of lessons that is drawn from academic textbooks, and presents it in a facilitative way. Any person could deliver this, be it teacher, tutor, parent or sibling. Students unable to attend, through sickness, life disruptions, school refusal can continue to progress; students whose lessons were disrupted through poor class behaviour, schools incidents or teacher absence; continuity is maintained – so long as the internet is live. Facilitative learning provisioned though a VLE is the Tesla of the classroom, an entirely new architecture for the next era of learning.
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